dVS with LBT teaming

[SaPu]

Hello

I have one vDS with 8 uplinks (1 GBit/nic) and more portgroups (all with own VLAN IDs) configured

1x SC

1x VMkernel for vMotion

1x VMkernel for NFS storage

8x VM network

As teaming policy we choosed "Route based on physical NIC load" (LBT) as it seems to be a really nice implementation for the balancing of the network traffic.

Does anyone know which change is needed to have also the storage traffic balanced over more pnics? With one VMkernel port we have max 1 GBit for storage traffic and I want to use at least 2 GBit for it. Is one additional VMkernel port enough or is it really necessary to split the datastore connections over two VMkernel ports?

Regards.

SaPu

[Virtuadude]

Practically, one VMkernel can take care of the entire datastore traffic.

But for load balancing and redundancy purposes you must have atleast two VMkernel portgroups dedicated for the iSCSI traffic.

You should also consider the port binding techinique recommended by VMware.

As far as LBT is concerned this will  also depend on physical switch configuration.

Let us say you have 8 physical NICS but only two are connected to the iSCSI traffic VLAN, only those two NICS will be used for the storage traffic.

If you wish you may configure trunking (802.1q) to allow iSCSI traffic along with other VLANs traffic so that other physical nics also can be used for iSCSI traffic.

however, It is always recommended to have dedicated nics for ISCSI traffic.

[SaPu]

Hello Virtuadude

Many thanks for your answer, unfortunately I don't have any iSCSI connections, the storage is attached over NFS.

Regards.

Sal

[Virtuadude]

Same settings and configuration is applicable for NFS as well.

more than one  vmkernel portgroups will help in redundancy and dedicated network cards are recommended for NFS traffic as well.